The Week In Books: A feast of rich and dark materials

Monoculture threatens literature just as much as landscape. If featureless plains of soya beans or oilseed rape can ruin not just the charm but the resilience of an eco-system, then a reading culture built around a narrow band of middle-of-the-road fiction and biography runs the risk of wrecking its fertility. From tutors on creative-writing courses I hear the complaint that their students simply don't read in sufficient breadth or depth beyond the star names. Somehow, the wannabes presume that native talent will prevail. If so, they ought to take a look into the vast, varied hinterland of authors who not only wow the critics but also top the charts.

Philip Pullman has become the second selector – after Sebastian Faulks – to choose a "Writer's Table" of 40 favourite books for Waterstone's. As if we needed to be told, the imagination that soared from a parallel Oxford to Svalbard and Cittagazze draws its own dark materials from a galaxy of genius that makes the word "eclectic" sound pinched. His fiction options swoop from Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks to John Le Carré's A Perfect Spy by way of Kleist's Marquise of O, Art Spiegelman's Maus, HG Wells, PG Wodehouse and HP Lovecraft.

Poetry spans Rilke's Duino Elegies, Elizabeth Bishop and nursery rhymes. Children's works include Hergé's Tintin and Tove Jansson's Moomintrolls. Richard Dawkins and Roger Penrose bat for superstition-busting science; William James excavates The Varieties of Religious Experience. An awkward squad of oddball masterworks features Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet, the comic columns of Flann O'Brien, Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Film. This Top 40 (listed at www.waterstones.com/writerstable) is a cultural education in itself, conducted by a rebel academy of strong-minded mavericks and spell-binding storytellers.

From the Grimms' fairy tales via Van Gogh's letters to Musil's epic satire, The Man Without Qualities, 25 per cent of Pullman's picks come from languages other than English. Notably, he avoids classic English poets. But why has he omitted Milton, since without Paradise Lost the imaginary world of His Dark Materials might never have seen the light? Perhaps, for Pullman, Milton operates as God does in the poet's theology – invisible but omnipotent.

Against the dreary agribusiness of today's book trade, Pullman's ideal landscape is a dense peasant patchwork of contrasting genres, styles and eras. From such rich soil new masterpieces sprout. How apt that among his choices is Exercises in Style by the Parisian prankster Raymond Queneau, a theme-and-variations piece which tells the same yarn in 99 different ways. Look in chain bookstores these days and you will more often find 99 stories told in exactly the same way. We should relish the feast on Pullman's table while we can – and watch out to check how visible Queneau or Pessoa remain when this sumptuous banquet has been cleared away.

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